Mariana Baabar writes in The Outlook: "Rescripting history is Musharraf's homage to 'secular' Jinnah"

Pakistan under the aegis of President Pervez Musharraf has effected many U-turns in the wake of 9/11: Afghanistan, Taliban, India, Kashmir, terrorism—the list can go on and on. But from the perspective of the future, nothing perhaps is as momentous as the government’s decision of last week to revise the national curriculum, an elaborate set of guidelines on what schoolchildren should be taught. Inherited wisdom has been declared passe, old theories debunked and ejected and liberal values assigned primacy. It is, so to speak, a belated attempt to create a new Pakistani.

Among the many theories cast anew will be the raison d’etre of Pakistan itself: in the new thinking, it came into being not because Hindus and Muslims were/are separate nations but because of social, economic, cultural deprivation of Muslims, who, to protect their interests in undivided India, carved out a separate nation.

This perspective tacitly rejects the idea that people of a faith constitute a separate nation, that they must necessarily have their own separate state, that Partition was a historical inevitability. Indeed, there couldn’t have been a more radical revision of the two-nation theory.

The new curriculum also wants schoolkids to imbibe the secular kernel of Jinnah’s vision: the Pakistan state does not exclude non-Muslims. The complete article is also available on the online version of Outlook.

Commenting on the article, Dr. A. H. Nayyer said
It is a nice report. Yes, the battle of ideologies continues in Pakistan. What Qazi Hussain Ahmed has said was expected of him because the changes, if and when they come, would amount to a strategic reversal of all that his political party, the Jamaat-e-Islami, had so assiduously achieved over the two decades since the wave of Islamization began in the early eighties. The reaction of the likes of Shireen Mazari was also not unexpected because they are incapable of even imagining a Pakistan without relating it to India in an animus way. They even fail to admit that what was being pedaled as curriculum was clearly violating the country's constitution.

Mariana Baber is also right in underscoring the US role in causing this reversal. The changes would not have come about without pressures from outside. On the other hand, our report had clearly identified the US as the source of much of the wrongs in the previous curriculum. Pursuing the short sighted policy of defeating communism, the United States government gave life to the chicken that has now come home to roost.

But the formost thing to do now is to make sure that the promised changes come into effect. The religious right will most certainly challenge the government - in streets, in the parliament, in newspapers - knowing that Musharraf has repeatedly cowered before such agitations. Musharraf's political exigencies will also determine the fate of the proposed changes, as they did in the case of many legal reforms. Pakistani civil society must gear up to launch a campaign in favour of the curriculum changes.


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Posted by collective at December 25, 2006 11:13 AM